Particularly about human vision and how visual information gets processed, priority and timing, etc. Some cool experiments (upside down face recognition).
He does a good job explaining the crux of a much deeper science; his intent is mainly to provide background knowledge for aspiring doctors, but his own research is full-on neuroscience. It's a good example of topological sorting, building topics up from no-knowledge. And of course any knowledge of neuro-anatomy is humbling :)
Not sure best ever, but I really enjoyed “The Other Side of History” (available from Great Courses Plus now Wonderium). I found the deep dive into daily life through history helped me better understand the common threads that all humans experience.
Course Description:
Imagine you're a Greek soldier marching into battle in the front row of a phalanx. Or an Egyptian woman putting on makeup before attending an evening party with your husband. Or a Celtic monk scurrying away with the Book of Kells during a Viking invasion. Welcome to the other side of history, the 99% of ordinary people whose names don't make it into the history books—but whose lives are no less fascinating than the great leaders whose names we all know. Here you'll encounter such diverse individuals as:
a Mesopotamian hunter-gatherer making a living in one of the world's earliest permanent settlements;
an Egyptian craftsman decorating the pharaoh's tomb in the Valley of the Kings;
a Minoan fleeing the island of Santorini during a volcanic eruption;
a Greek citizen relaxing at a drinking party with the likes of Socrates;
a Roman slave captured in war and sent to work in the mines; and
Thanks for this recommendation. It sounds like something I'd be interested in and I just found the audiobook for free as part of my Audible membership.
A long time ago I found a free UC Berkeley class, I think it was Psych 117: Drugs and Human Behavior that was absolutely phenomenal, but I can’t seem to find it anymore.
More recently, the course was called "Drugs and the Brain". It was intended as a survey course so maybe slightly different topics than the one linked here.
Extremely clear and satisfying lectures that covers all of basic physics. Much of it is accessible to anyone with some spare time and first year university!
I still occasionally think about the series on Rome, and also the Rise of the Khans series. (Also, apparently, it's pronounced Jenghis - who knew?!). The series on World War I is also phenomenally interesting and really paints the picture of just how brutal and senseless that war was. The section on Verdun is particularly harrowing.
Another one that I think everyone should hear is "Logical Insanity", where Dan talks through the civilian bombing campaigns of WWII. He makes a case that the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fit into this wider pattern of bombings in a really interesting way - those two events obviously loom large in our thinking about history, but in the context of WWII they were almost... mundane. Just two more bombings of civilians in a war that was full of the same. (Dan makes the case in a much more fleshed out way, so please don't take my half-assed description as an indicator of the quality of the episode).
These have all fallen behind the paywall at this point but they are well worth the money and time.
Just watch the first lecture and you won't be able to not watch the rest. It starts with making your own autograd engine in 100 lines of python, similar to PyTorch and then builds up to a GPT network. He's one of the best in the field, founder of OpenAI, then Director of AI at Tesla. Nothing like the scam tutorials that just copy-paste random code from the internet.
Alright, I'll bite. What makes you feel that way, and what do you prefer for the same subject matter instead? I don't know of many people posting this type of content in a raw format to youtube.
Let me help you there. Have you considered writing: "I think this lecture series is overrated, because $SERIES_A and $SERIES_B is much better, because ..."
Or you could explain why you dislike the communication style, the pace or anything else that others could also relate to.
This way we can just guess, and guessing includes bad options like "dev_0 just had a petty conflict with the lecturer" or "dev_0 tried themselves to teach this and did worse so it is envy".
So if you want to provide value, please explain yourself or just don't comment with one word in the future. If you don't want to provide value, consider commenting on youtube instead.
I think the comment provided value. I was about to start watching it but now I won't and I don't really care why they think that. The fact that someone thinks it's so overrated that they need to comment on it is enough.
That would be great. My ever-expanding backlog gives me anxiety so I'm always looking for an escape hatch. A small comment like that is enough to give me peace and lose the FOMO.
YouTube’s default comment sort appears to do sentiment analysis to decide what to show - even remotely negative comments and replies I’ve made simply do not show up unless you switch to “New”
It appears to work - nearly all videos appear chock full of only positive feedback.
I did not know that. It is amazing how perception of HN changes drastically once you turn this flag on. It is not as extreme as "turning into a completely different website" but certainly it becomes less interesting. There is a sizeable amount of toxicity.
Yes. That's one cost of having a large, open, optionally-anonymous internet forum. We can't stop such posts but consigning them to a separate partition seems to work ok.
The "Let's build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out." demystifies so much of machine learning and chatbots. It's so cool to see how simple python code can be leveraged into something so amazing.
I quite enjoyed John Searle's Philosophy of the Mind course. [1] Searle obviously has strong opinions on the subject, but he does a good job of going through the history from Descartes onward about the big problems in the philosophy of mind and how various philosophers have grappled with them, and he's enjoyable to listen to. The lectures midway through on functionalism and computational theories of the mind would probably be especially interesting to the HN audience. Towards the end he explains his own ideas about consciousness (though I found them to be less compelling than the earlier lectures in the course).
I took this course as an undergrad. It was in fact required for anyone studying CogSci.
Can you imagine being a religion major and being forced to take a class from an atheist scientist? It was like that. Searle believes that General AI is impossible from a philosophical prospective, and the final exam requires you to defend or argue against that position. But if you argue against it you get no better than a B.
Washington Street Studios' pottery playlist. Taught me a ton about ceramics. Sadly the lecturer Phil Berneburg has since passed away, but it's more or less the equivalent of the theoretical side of an undergraduate degree in ceramics.
many great suggestions but i can't believe no one has mentioned the original SICP lectures yet :)! (and a thing i always enjoy in it is the transformation to the expressions of the students as more magic is revealed)
Introduction to Cryptography by Christof Paar: https://www.youtube.com/@introductiontocryptography4223. This is a great introductory cryptography course which is perfect to complement the great textbook from the same author.
I graduated with my CS degree back in 2016, but admittedly really disliked the curriculum at my university and have lacked some crucial knowledge.
One of the series I've picked at and skimmed at times for reference and relearning some concepts is MIT OpenCourseware's 6.006 (and other courses) taught primarily by Erik Demaine. He's much better than any instructor I had at San Jose state university and I've learned things better. Even when I watch his lectures and feel like I'm still missing some points, it's very easy to go back and review examples of his.
true brilliancy expressed in teaching and research BTW. Did he not coauthor quite a revolutionary proof recently? Cannot put my hand on it or remember what it was.
286 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 248 ms ] threadMost of us know very little about early American civilizations. Prof Barnhart's lecture series did wonders for expanding my knowledge.
Particularly about human vision and how visual information gets processed, priority and timing, etc. Some cool experiments (upside down face recognition).
Course Description:
Imagine you're a Greek soldier marching into battle in the front row of a phalanx. Or an Egyptian woman putting on makeup before attending an evening party with your husband. Or a Celtic monk scurrying away with the Book of Kells during a Viking invasion. Welcome to the other side of history, the 99% of ordinary people whose names don't make it into the history books—but whose lives are no less fascinating than the great leaders whose names we all know. Here you'll encounter such diverse individuals as:
a Mesopotamian hunter-gatherer making a living in one of the world's earliest permanent settlements;
an Egyptian craftsman decorating the pharaoh's tomb in the Valley of the Kings; a Minoan fleeing the island of Santorini during a volcanic eruption;
a Greek citizen relaxing at a drinking party with the likes of Socrates;
a Roman slave captured in war and sent to work in the mines; and
a medieval pilgrim on the road to Canterbury.
https://www.thegreatcourses.com/courses/the-other-side-of-hi...
A lot of the courses are more like somebody reading out a textbook.
bidirectional programming is something I like a lot, never thought an evaluator could be encoded like that
https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/
Extremely clear and satisfying lectures that covers all of basic physics. Much of it is accessible to anyone with some spare time and first year university!
Extremely good and interesting class on data structures and algorithms, with great auto-graded assignments as well.
Another one that I think everyone should hear is "Logical Insanity", where Dan talks through the civilian bombing campaigns of WWII. He makes a case that the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fit into this wider pattern of bombings in a really interesting way - those two events obviously loom large in our thinking about history, but in the context of WWII they were almost... mundane. Just two more bombings of civilians in a war that was full of the same. (Dan makes the case in a much more fleshed out way, so please don't take my half-assed description as an indicator of the quality of the episode).
These have all fallen behind the paywall at this point but they are well worth the money and time.
Just watch the first lecture and you won't be able to not watch the rest. It starts with making your own autograd engine in 100 lines of python, similar to PyTorch and then builds up to a GPT network. He's one of the best in the field, founder of OpenAI, then Director of AI at Tesla. Nothing like the scam tutorials that just copy-paste random code from the internet.
Or you could explain why you dislike the communication style, the pace or anything else that others could also relate to.
This way we can just guess, and guessing includes bad options like "dev_0 just had a petty conflict with the lecturer" or "dev_0 tried themselves to teach this and did worse so it is envy".
So if you want to provide value, please explain yourself or just don't comment with one word in the future. If you don't want to provide value, consider commenting on youtube instead.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law
It appears to work - nearly all videos appear chock full of only positive feedback.
You can see them by enabling "showdead" on your profile, or you can go here. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34592145
The lectures are a perfect complement to his book "Twenty lectures on algorithmic game theory".
Not hugely insightful or something, but if anyone wants to get into game dev, it’s a great start.
Through this course I can into contact with Lua & LÖVE and still enjoy both a lot (only in hobby projects).
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi7Va_4ekko&list=PL039MUyjHR...
Can you imagine being a religion major and being forced to take a class from an atheist scientist? It was like that. Searle believes that General AI is impossible from a philosophical prospective, and the final exam requires you to defend or argue against that position. But if you argue against it you get no better than a B.
I got a B.
https://youtube.com/@yoprofmatt
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLS6Mrdpt53RyauAg8bGN-...
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00729d9
Also John McWhorter lectures are usually very interesting and fun to listen to.
https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKiz0UZowP2V0mwtNv1lc1_...
[1]: https://news.mit.edu/2014/lewin-courses-removed-1208
All of you have looked at rainbows, but very few of you have ever seen one!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXZ9K_1rJww
MIT physics 801 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyQSN7X0ro203puVhQsmC...
MIT physics 802 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyQSN7X0ro2314mKyUiOI...
MIT physics 803 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyQSN7X0ro22WeXM2QCKJ...
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6i60qoDQhQGaGbbg-4aS...
Seminar on Macroeconomics, Randall Wray:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnw-449iRxO-BbfN55FdO...
Modern Money and Public Purpose:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zEbo8PIPSc&list=PLoGqI16J4b...
One of the series I've picked at and skimmed at times for reference and relearning some concepts is MIT OpenCourseware's 6.006 (and other courses) taught primarily by Erik Demaine. He's much better than any instructor I had at San Jose state university and I've learned things better. Even when I watch his lectures and feel like I'm still missing some points, it's very easy to go back and review examples of his.
[0] - https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.10774 [1] - https://www.quantamagazine.org/father-son-team-solves-geomet...